Introduction

It was on his mother's twenty-seventh birthday that the child discovered his parents' age in relation to his own. In retrospect, that day marks, for him, the “awakening of consciousness” and “the dawning of the sense of time.” Birthdays, it seems to him, lend themselves to establishing relationships, to commemorating the past and giving significance to the present. Furthermore, they offer an ideal backdrop for self-fashioning, for sketching the model of the self one wants to present to the world.

Vladimir Nabokov, from whose autobiography Speak, Memory I have been quoting, is of course an expert in both objectifying and fictionalizing his own existence. The parallels I wish to hint at between the birthday celebrations of a human being and that of a literary society, namely the German Shakespeare Society, are not as far-fetched as it appears at first sight. Like the writer, the Shakespeare Society has always been aware of its own age mostly in relation to that of its poet parent: “Shakespeares Kind” (Shakespeare's child) the president calls the Society in April 1874 when it has reached the tender age of ten. In the same manner, its foundation on 23 April 1864 on the occasion of the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations becomes known as its “birth,” a term which illustrates the way in which the image of the Society is being shaped like that of a human being. Some years later, when, in the eyes of German Shakespeareans, Shakespeare begets another child, namely the short-lived New Shakespeare Society in England, it is warmly welcomed by its “elder sister,” the German Shakespeare Society.